The headline: “Hamtramck City Council votes to allow animal sacrifice for religious purposes in the city.”
The act of animal sacrifice is often practiced among Muslims during the celebration of Eid al-Fitr, and Muslims make up a majority on the council, it seems. There’s not much more that needs to be said, is there?
Your Ethics Alarms Ethics Quiz to begin this cold and gloomy Thursday (at least where I am) is…
Those polled were asked, “Please tell me how you would rate the honesty and ethical standards of people in these different fields — very high, high, average, low or very low?” Continue reading
This isn’t an ethics quiz. It’s not ethics commentary. This is clearly an ethics episode, but, frankly, I’m exhausted. I’m fighting some kind of flu (no, not Wu-Flu); I have a pile of half-begun and half-thought out ethics stories on a cyber-pile, and I just feel overwhelmed and depressed. So I’m just going to present this weird event from the public [NOT ‘pubic,’ as I typoed once again] school chaos, and I invite readers to explain what ethics issues they see here.
Ready?
For the latest edition of the NPR’s podcast “Planet Money”, Shale Meadows Elementary School third grade teacher Mandy Robek was scheduled to read books reading “The Sneetches” to her class as part of about the theme of economics education from in children’s books. Amanda Beeman, the assistant director of communications for the Olentangy Local School District (in Ohio) prepared for the segment by choosing books from the school’s library. The district had stipulated that politics were off limits for discussion. “Pancakes, Pancakes!” by Eric Carle; “Put Me In The Zoo” by Robert Lopshire; a poem from “Where The Sidewalk Ends” by Shel Silverstein, and “The Sneetches” by Dr. Seuss were ultimately read to the class. Well…almost.
You know “The Sneetches,” right? Published in 1961, the story is about a community of long-necked birds that all look identical except that some have stars on their bellies and some don’t. The Plain-Belly Sneetches are traeted by the rest as inferiors, so entrepreneur Sylvester McMonkey McBean sells them stars so they can aspire to be Star-Belly Sneetches.The Star-Bellied Sneetches, resenting the intrusion on their select domain, then succumb to a scheme to have them pay to remove their natural stars. Now the once- Star-Bellied Sneetches will be Plain-Belly Sneetches, and can look down on the former Plain-Belly Sneetches all over again. Meanwhile, supply and demand makes the local capitalist rich.
“I don’t know if I feel comfortable with the book being one of the ones featured,” Beeman was heard saying on the podcast during the middle of “The Sneetches” reading by the teacher. “I just feel like this isn’t teaching anything about economics, and this is a little bit more about differences with race and everything like that.” As if on cue, a third-grade student soon piped up, “It’s almost like what happened back then, how people were treated … Like, disrespected … Like, white people disrespected Black people!” Continue reading
If this doesn’t make a lot of Americans understand the conservative agenda items seeking smaller government, less powerful government agencies and reduced federal regulation, nothing will.
The Consumer Product Safety Commission is opening a period of public comments on the “dangers of gas stoves.” An estimated 40% of the public uses gas stoves. Most restaurants use gas stoves; some foreign cuisines, like Chinese varieties, depend on them. Nobody has complained noticeably about gas stoves being deadly in the 200 years they have been in use. Never mind: CPCP commissioner Richard Trumka Jr. told Bloomberg News, “This is a hidden hazard. Any option is on the table. Products that can’t be made safe can be banned.”
How are gas stoves “unsafe”? The EPA and WHO say they “emit pollutants including nitrogen dioxide, carbon monoxide and fine particulate matter” above levels deemed acceptable. The sudden rush to ban the stoves appears to have been triggered by (or was waiting around hoping to find such a claim as) a single study published in the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health. Of course, the Climate Nazis have been agitating about gas stoves on the sidelines for decades, which, they say, “jump-starts childhood asthma, increases the risk of respiratory problems, and emits planet-warming gasses.” Naturally, then, the mainstream media can be expected to cheer-lead the latest government effort to use the environment as an excuse to control American lives and choices just a bit more, because they know best. The Washington Post’s climate change propagandist gave her seal of approval yesterday.
Don’t worry about the extra costs of getting those electric ovens, she assures us. After all,
…the Inflation Reduction Act, a landmark climate bill passed last year, includes cash to help low- and moderate-income households move away from their gas stoves. Starting later this year, millions of Americans could get up to $840 off the cost of an electric or induction stove.
Inflation reduction! Landmark! Hand-outs for low- and moderate-income households, as long as they spend the money on what they’re told to! National debt? What’s that? Nah, the mainstream media isn’t pimping for the Democrats! Why would anyone think that?
“I think it would be [hypocritical] for [Speaker McCarthy] to remove, you know, the first African-born on the subcommittee on Africa on the Foreign Affairs Committee, where I’ve had the opportunity to not only represent my constituents but the voice of so many people who have never had a voice on the Foreign Affairs Committee.”
—Rep. Omar (D-Minn), playing the race card, as usual.
I take no stand at this point regarding the tit-for-tat move of Speaker Kevin McCarthy to pull Omar from the the Foreign Affairs Committee, presumably because of her frequent anti-Semitic outbursts. The Democratic House had kicked Republican Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene off the Budget and as well as the Education and Labor Committees in February 2021 over her comments pushing conspiracy theories about Jews. McCarthy is simply applying the standards Nancy Pelosi established. (Both Greene and Omar are unethical Congresswomen who embarrass the institution as well as the districts that elected them.)
However, Omar’s claim that “historic” officials (translation: some combination of black, foreign-born, female, Muslim, gay or trans) should be held to different (translation: lower) standards of conduct than others is, while wholly predictable, unethical by definition, as well as self-serving, discriminatory, and nauseating.
But that’s Rep. Omar.
And her party.
And the progressives who make up most of the membership of that party.
And the various tribal groups they cluster in.
Let’s start with a memorable quote from that eloquent villain, Auric Goldfinger: “Once is happenstance. Twice is coincidence. The third time it’s enemy action.”
This is enemy action against motivated and talented students, responsible and trusting parents, and core American values. It should be reported as such and responded to with the vigor and relentlessness the attack warrants, but the news media is burying the story, because they are enemies as well.
Happenstance: My fault. I reported this story as the last item in the Ethics Alarms Christmas Eve ethics outrage collection, here, pretty much guaranteeing that even fewer people would see it than usual. It should have been a full post. I wrote,
City-Journal reports that at Thomas Jefferson High in Fairfax, Virginia, two administrators have been withholding notifications of National Merit awards from the school’s students awarded them, most of them Asian. This denied those students the chance to use those awards to boost their college-admission prospects and earn scholarships. The author believes that this was intentional, a part of “the school district’s new strategy of “equal outcomes for every student, without exception.” School administrators, for instance, have implemented an “equitable grading” policy that eliminates zeros, gives students a grade of 50 percent just for showing up, and assigns a cryptic code of “NTI” for assignments not turned in. It’s a race to the bottom.”The school’s leadership is acting as if it was just an oversight—for at least three years. Read the article. [Pointer: Mark Metcalf]
Well, hey, that’s just one DEI-obsessed principal, and she’s apologized and maybe will get fired, so all is well, right? Wrong:
Coincidence? The Fairfax Times reports that while Fairfax County Public Schools Superintendent Michelle Reid claimed the principal at Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology withheld National Merit awards from students in a “one-time human error,” Langley High School Principal Kim Greer sent an email to parents apologizing for doing the same thing:
It isn’t as if there aren’t more than enough legitimate accusations one can make against Rep. George Santos, the phony, lying, none-too-bright Republican from New York who somehow faked his way into Congress Nonetheless, the Republican-hating news media still has to manufacture absurd accusations against this jerk to demonize the whole party, to wit: Based on the instant captured in the photo above, we were told…
And so on. All completely unfair and contrived, as this video shows: Continue reading
Because that’s what it is?
I’m actually grateful for the question, because I have become more adamant about resisting the deliberately deceptive misnomer for the virus as time goes on and more information becomes available. In 2020, when the pandemic was just starting to wreck the United States’ on many levels, it was pretty obvious that the virus had its start in the Wuhan province of China. Whether it was from a lab or the (disgusting, third-world level wet markets) was and still is uncertain, but Wuhan is where the first recorded case emerged, and where the pathogen took first hold in December of 2019.
Early on in 2020, then-President Trump and some media sources referred to the virus as the “Wuhan virus” or the “China virus,” and these useful and descriptive terms were quickly declared unfair, inaccurate, and “racist.” by the Left. Part of the motivation was, I believe, to suck up to China, a corrupt and dangerous nation that too many businesses and industries (like Hollywood and the NBA) view as a profitable target for unprincipled pandering, Another aspect of the linguistic cover-up was to, as usual in the age of The Great Stupid, choose censorship and public confusion in the quixotic and bizarre effort to make certain groups feel “safe” (as in “safe from reality”). Because there are morons who will bully and mistreat Chinese-Americans as “punishment” for a disaster they could not be rationally blamed for, the widiculous woke decreed that the origins and true responsibility for the pandemic must be obscured by technical jargon. Continue reading
This post was almost titled “Stop Making Me Defend Governor Hochul!” Conservative pundits, bloggers and busybodies are freaking out over Governor Kathy Hochul (D-NY) signing into law legislation that makes New York the sixth state to legalize the composting human remains. The law adds “natural organic reduction” to cremation and entombment as legal ways to dispose of bodies. The new law defines the practice as the “contained, accelerated conversion of human remains to soil” in a “structure, room, or other space” in which decomposition can occur.
To all of which I say, “Fine.” Any time government increases individual autonomy and the liberty to do as citizens please as long as it doesn’t harm society or other individuals, or infringe on their rights, that’s an ethics win. It is especially encouraging to see a Democratic governor move in this direction, since her party has lately embraced a philosophy of seeking more restrictions on core American rights—like, say, freedom of speech— rather than fewer.
Never mind, though: some on the right are eager to bash Hochul anyway.
A just-released Rasmussen Reports national telephone and online survey concluded that 49% of American adults believe it is likely that Wuhan virus vaccines have caused a significant number of unexplained deaths. Twenty-eight percent think it’s “Very Likely” that the side effects of the vaccine have been deadly to many in contrast with 37% who don’t believe that a significant number of deaths have been caused by vaccine side effects. Fourteen percent are not sure, the usual group that isn’t sure of anything.
You can question the accuracy of this poll or all polls, you can believe that the vaccine skeptics are hysterics, you can believe that these numbers are in large part the result of “misinformation.” However, there is no question that even if they are inaccurate, the numbers show a shocking level of distrust in the pandemic vaccines, and, by extension, vaccines in general as well the health professionals and elected officials who have promoted them. When asked if there are legitimate safety concerns surrounding the shots, or whether doubts have been seeded by conspiracy theorists, 48% said there that concerns are valid. Only 37% indicated that false conspiracy theories were behind the public’s fears.
Glenn Reynolds, the Beauchamp Brogan Distinguished Professor of Law at the University of Tennessee College of Law and one of the most widely read conservative blogger, has it exactly right, writing, Continue reading
